It's been very quiet on "radio GNUpod" for a while. Mostly because it simply works for me.

Last week however I felt like making some minor changes and realized how unreadable some Perl code becomes if you leave it alone for a while. So I looked for an IDE that would help me to quickly jump around in the code and found EPIC, an Eclipse extension that turns Eclipse into a Perl IDE. And all of a sudden Perl became fun again.

This is also good news if you are waiting for support of the newer iPod models. Supporting the newer sqlite based file formats and even the 3. generation shuffle (the no-buttons clip) will necessitate some deep changes in GNUpod's soft and squishy guts (mktunes and tunes2pod mostly) and without an IDE I was very reluctant to dive into that piece of code.

The last thing that kept me from rewriting those parts of gnupod was the absence of pain. My 3gen nano works like a charm.
But... the latest iPod nano (the 2010 model) looks mightily interesting. As much as I detest the closed-and-welded-shut policy that they have in regard to 3. party software, that much I have to admit that I like their hardware and usability department. So I soon may have an itch to scratch after all.

GNUpod 0.98.8 released (05 Aug. 2009)

As announced last month the new GNUpod release 0.99.8 is done.
The download mirrors already contain gnupod-0.99.8.tgz.

This release is mostly a bugfix release. Ubuntu users in particular
should no longer see mktunes hanging on auto detection of the fwguid
and 4gen nano users will enjoy complete artwork support.
There are only a few new features. Most notably the Replay Gain
handling has been completely reworked.

GNUpod has moved from CVS to git.
The GNUpod git repository is at savannah and you
can access it with your browser if you don't want to install git on your system.
You can also download a red hot snapshot of the development version at any
time here.

Please report any problems/bugs to the bug tracker on savannah
or subscribe to our mailinglist.
If you have any cool ideas or other things to tell us, please use
our mailing list to get in contact.
It is subscribers-only so the traffic is rather low, ranging from 3 messages per month to 3 messages per day.